Topic: Hockey

NHL commissioner Gary Bettman, currently overseeing the third prolonged labor dispute in less than 20 years, makes for an easy villain. But the awful paradoxes with which he has presented fans—a league that hurts its fans to grow its fan-base and foregoes games to increase revenue—have had an unusual effect: they've reminded fans, in the game's absence, of how much hockey is really worth.

The NHL lockout looks likely to go on for some time. Based on this (imaginary) pilot, the exceedingly nasty and fraught fashion critique television show featuring unemployed NHL buds Sean Avery and Ryan Callahan may not last very long at all. But have you ever had an imaginary television show? Like, even one episode of one?

The second and final part of our look into what NHL captains are doing without NHL hockey finds some players becoming vampires, others eating cheese with weird hair in it, and a goodly percentage working on recuperating from concussions. The usual offseason stuff, in other words, but with no actual season in the immediate future.

With the NHL locked out for, let's say, forever, the league's foremost leaders of men will have to find new ways to pass their time. These are probably not those, but considering this question may be the last hockey any of us get for some time.

Todd Bertuzzi is famous for harming people as a hockey player. But credit where it's due: one of the NHL's baddest did come up with a very good way to nearly kill a (female) 11-year-old goalie back when he was just a minor league star/budding sociopath.

What is Theo Fleury doing singing a bunch of hokey-ish country songs on stage in the same arena he used to light up as a NHL star? Finding his voice, refusing to be quiet, and other admirable things, it turns out.